Free choice permission as resource-sensitive reasoning

Free choice permission is a long-standing puzzle in deontic logic and in natural language semantics. It involves what appears to be a conjunctive use of or : from You may eat an apple or a pear, we can infer that You may eat an apple and that You may eat a pear — though not that You may eat an apple and a pear. Following Lokhorst (1997), I argue that because permission is a limited resource, a resource-sensitive logic such as Girard’s Linear Logic is better suited to modeling permission talk… CONTINUE READING